Crooked House
by RockSunner
Summary: What if Dipper tried to document the most mysterious, unexplained feature of Gravity Falls that is right in front of his nose: the physically impossible Mystery Shack itself?
1. Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained Attic

What if Dipper tried to document the most mysterious, unexplained feature of Gravity Falls that is right in front of his nose: the physically impossible Mystery Shack itself? All characters are owned by Alex Hirsch and Disney, not me.

**Crooked House**

The video rolls, showing a hand-printed title card: "Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained #111: 'The Attic of the Mystery Shack'."

"Dipper here, documenting a Gravity Falls mystery that has been under our noses since we first arrived: the Mystery Shack itself. This building is physically impossible, and yet it exists. Mabel and I will show you."

"It's not impossible, Dipping-Sauce," said Mabel. "You're just being goofy."

"I'll prove it. First, there is a lot of extra closet space up here. Go over and stand in our bedroom door. Good. Notice that the door is set flush with the wall," said Dipper.

"Yeah, so?" said Mabel.

"I'll open the curtained closet space to the left of our door. There's a bunch of old junk in here, including a coffin in the corner, right?"

"Yes," said Mabel. "I store my sweaters in that."

"Really?" asked Dipper.

"Hey, if Grunkle Stan won't give me a big wardrobe like I have at home... You know, if we did have a wardrobe here maybe it would lead to Narnia," said Mabel.

"I'm going into that curtained space now. I'm in. Still standing in the doorway, knock on the wall just outside the door, to your left," said Dipper.

"Knock knock!" said Mabel. She knocked. "You're supposed to say 'Who's there?'"

Dipper said, "Notice, the knock came from the back of the curtained space, several feet deeper in from the door. But there's no space for it on the outside. Just the first of many impossibilities up here."

"Who's there? Mabel," said Mabel. "Now say 'Mabel who?' Come on, I can't do the jokes all by myself."

Dipper sighed, "Mabel who?"

"May Bill come in?" said Mabel.

"That's not a very funny knock-knock joke," said Dipper.

"Seriously, he's out here," said Mabel.

"Yow! D-don't do anything to us. We'll get all the evidence on tape," said Dipper.

Dipper ran to the door, pointing his video camera. There was nobody there.

Mabel giggled, "Made you look."

"Really not funny," said Dipper.

Bill (who really was there, just cloaked) thought, "They'll get in real trouble if they keep probing the dimensional anomalies here. Maybe even get trapped in another dimension like their grandfather. Should I warn them? Naah, it's more fun watching them get into messes."

"Come on, Mabel," said Dipper. "Next we'll look at why the attic stained-glass window, which is in the long wall to the left of our bedroom, looks out onto the narrow side, above the back porch. Again, no space. And that should be the wall at the opposite end from our bedroom, not at right angles to it."

"Let's probe it with my grappling hook," said Mabel.

"Actually, that's a really good suggestion," said Dipper. "We'll try that in next episode of Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained."

"They're doomed," thought Bill.


	2. Hallways and Holes

**Hallways and Holes**

"Ready for the grappling hook?" asked Mabel.

"Not quite," said Dipper. "I want to check out a few more things up here first. Like the mystery hallway to the right side of our room as you face it from the stairs. I saw Soos back into it once, but normally you can't see it when you come up the stairs."

"It's there, all right," said Mabel. "That's where Lebam, my mirror clone, hid while she stayed with us. Watch this."

Mabel backed up into a certain place in the wall, and the passage appeared. It was a hallway with one room off of it to the right and curtains hanging across the back.

"What hides this hallway, I wonder," asked Dipper. "A hologram?"

"Magic," said Mabel.

"Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said Dipper.

"Like I said, pure magic," said Mabel.

The small room to the right side of the hallway had stained-glass windows that looked out from under Wendy's break area on the roof. The room was empty and undecorated, except for a large black pentagram drawn on the floor. There was also a hole in the corner with a ladder.

Mabel climbed part-way down the ladder and looked. "This comes out in the museum, behind the wooden backdrop of the Sascrotch. Hee hee, Sascrotch."

"I've got a creepy feeling about this room," said Dipper, backing out. "Let's go down to the end."

Toward the end of the hall was a curtained-off area with a closet on the left side. On the other side was a coffin with an old TV on it.

"You know, this clutter looks a lot like the stuff behind the curtain in our bedroom," said Dipper.

"It does, but not exactly the same. There's an old fortune-teller dummy in ours," said Mabel. "This area is a lot bigger, and this closet's toward the end, not close to the curtain."

"I remember this space now. This is the closet my clones tried to trap me in, the night I wanted to ask Wendy to dance," said Dipper. "They all stood outside the room and argued and there was plenty of space for them all. Also plenty of space for me to sneak out without them noticing."

"The closet here is where Lebam slept, on the coats. She had a stash of Smile Dip in there," said Mabel.

"Oh, I found that when I was locked in the closet," said Dipper. "I thought it was yours. I wondered how you got more of that stuff when it was banned everywhere. Remember, I asked you about whether you were eating more of it when you were all wild about the Sev'ral Timez concert?"

"Lebam went back to the Dusk 2 Dawn and talked Ma and Pa into giving her some," said Mabel. "I wouldn't have done it myself. That's evil stuff and the ghosts were scary. But she's on good terms with them now."

"Really?" asked Dipper.

"They feed her and her boy-band friends in exchange for pop music," said Mabel.

"So you really did have the Sev'ral Timez guys up here?" asked Dipper. "I suspected that."

"I guess I spilled the beans," said Mabel. She produced a can of beans from her pocket, set it on the floor, and tipped it over with her foot. "Beans."

"But isn't she nearly a teen?" asked Dipper. "The ghosts will turn on her in less than a year."

"Technically she's not," said Mabel. "She was created just about a month ago, but she has my full growth and my stupendous bubbly personality. The band guys are artificially-aged clones. They can all get away with being non-teens for years."

* * *

"Let's look at that side stained-glass window now," said Dipper.

"That's where we'll need my grappling hook!" said Mabel.

"In a few minutes, Mabel," said Dipper. "Be patient."

"I'll try," said Mabel. "I can hardly believe I'll finally get to use it."

"You used it to save our lives," said Dipper.

"Yeah, but I mean as part of a Mystery Twins investigation."

They came back into the main attic room and Dipper opened the pink and red stained-glass window above the window seat.

"I escaped from Wax Sherlock Holmes this way," Dipper said. "When I climbed out I was on the green awning over the porch. It's much wider on the inside here, just like it's wider down below."

"Wax Sherlock sure wasn't as smart as he thought he was, was he?" asked Mabel.

"You really think you can outwit me boy? I'm Sherlock bleeding Holmes! Have you seen my magnifying glass? It's enormous! " said Dipper in a phony English accent.

Both chuckled.

"You're really smart, not fake smart like him," said Mabel.

"That you, I resemble that remark," said Dipper.

"I'm not as smart as you, but I make up for it by being cute, witty, and creative," said Mabel.

"You have your strengths and I have mine," said Dipper diplomatically.

"I'm the alpha twin!" said Mabel.

Dipper returned to his study of the window.

"I don't understand how this lines up with the rooms below," said Dipper. "This wall is sideways to the back of the house, but it's somehow above the porch. To our right should be the kitchen, and to our left the hallway bends around the stairs. There should be Grunkle Stan's office, the bathroom, and his bedroom off that hallway. But all of that should be the other way, opposite our door."

"Dipper, I'm confused. Isn't Grunkle Stan's office out past the end of the living room? That's where we saw it when Gideon blew a hole in the wall."

"I'm convinced now when we saw that we were still in the dream. It didn't feel real, remember? And nobody tried to grab Gideon and get the deed from him," said Dipper.

"You sure about that?" asked Mabel.

"When we got the Shack back there was no hole in the living room wall. Everything was as neat as if nothing had happened. The only damage was a broken-out wall in the corner near the porch, Stan's real study, where Gideon must have really blasted the safe open."

"I guess you're right," said Mabel.

"Stan fixed that corner and built an extension out from the side so he could put in a window with blinds and have more light in that room," said Dipper.

"We gave him more light," said Mabel. "Lots of bright rainbow light."

"We sure did," said Dipper. "Who knew he would hate it?"

* * *

"I've got to look through the floor somehow and see what's really above what," said Dipper. "It's driving me crazy."

"Where shall we drill, captain?" asked Mabel.

"In our bedroom floor," said Dipper. "We can cover the hole with the throw rug."

They got a drill and soon hit a pipe. Dipper started a hole an little bit over and put a periscope down through it.

"Yikes!" he said. "Directly below us is the Gift Shop! But.. but there are no floors above the shop – it's a side wing. And the view faces in toward the vending machine. But up here, that direction is to the outside! This is insane!"

Mabel was still looking at the pipe from the first hole. "There's something written here."

"What does it say?" asked Dipper.

"ELOO LV ZDWFKLAJ," Mabel spelled out.

Dipper wrote it down. "This looks like one of the codes mentioned in my Journal. The three steps back code..."

He deciphered it and read, white-faced, "BILL IS WATCHING."

"No! Nooo!" Dipper shouted, quickly covering the holes with the throw rug. He ran from the room and threw up on the attic floor.

Bill was watching, invisibly. He laughed to himself.

* * *

"I am officially freaked out," said Dipper. "I want to give up."

"Not without trying the grappling hook," said Mabel.

"We're risking our lives and sanity," said Dipper. "But all right, if you insist."

They opened the stained glass window and their bedroom window. Mabel climbed a totem pole near the porch.

"Grappling hook!" she shouted, firing the gun through the window above the porch.

They ran around the side of the building. Sure enough, the hook was now dangling out of their bedroom window, a straight shot all the way through the building.

"But how will it look from inside?" asked Dipper.

"Only one way to find out!" said Mabel.

They ran in and back up the stairs and gasped. It was an amazing sight. The line went in straight, and hung in midair. A few feet away, the rest of the line hung straight also, pointing into their bedroom at right angles to the first part of the line.

"What happened to the line in between?" asked Mabel. She ran her hand from the first piece of line toward the gap.

"Don't touch it Mabel! It could be dangerous," Dipper said.

It was too late. Mabel's hand ran along the line and disappeared when it came to the gap.

"What the? It's cold, but it doesn't hurt," said Mabel.

She pulled her hand back. It was sparkling with snowflakes.


End file.
